Google Tweaks Buzz To Tackle Privacy Concerns 153
CWmike writes "Just two days after launching its Buzz social networking tools, Google said Thursday night that it had tweaked the technology to address early privacy concerns. Google said in a blog post that the quick updates makes it easier for users to block access to their pages and eases the path to finding two privacy features. 'We've had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback,' wrote Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, in the blog post. 'In particular there's been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn't yet have public profiles from following them.'"
The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
This blog [wordpress.com] shows what really happened:
I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.
You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.
Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.
It shows more eloquently than any privacy advocate ever could why privacy is so important when "you don't have anything to hide."
--
find a co-founder [fairsoftware.net]
Re:People don't read. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:NO MORE!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:People don't read. (Score:1, Interesting)
Reading instructions has nothing to do with it. As it stands, your information is leaked even if you block follows/followed from being posted, make your profile private, and disable buzz. A gmail user who does this still shows up in the follows/followed lists of the people they contact and who contact them most. Not an issue ... Unless your an attorney, a psychotherapist, the ex-spouse of an abusive husband, etc ... It's a problem when information was leaked before you enabled buzz and is still leaked after you do everything in your power to disable the service. I am a fan of what google is attempting, but the approach has serious flaws with serious implications. Please explain to me how reading the f-ing manual resolves this issue.
The problem with Google (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is, as the very first post described, we all do things in everyday life we don't want the world to know. Things we're perfectly entitled to do. But Google don't get it. I haven't used Google Docs because I'm scared there's some setting somewhere I won't know to turn off which will expose my documents to the world. Same concerns with GMail. Yahoo might hand your details over to the Chinese Government, but at least you don't need to worry about them telling *everyone* you've ever e-mailed! If a company ever did that, of course it would be Google.
Google is the sort of company that would break into your house and stick a webcam in your toilet "So you can socialize with your friends when you're sitting on the can." And they would be shocked when the people who find out about it object to it. The public is still largely ignorant about privacy, but with incidents like this slowly they will wake up. Google really needs to hire some serious Privacy experts to counterbalance people like Schmidt who can only see the dollars and not the bigger picture. Right now the best way for an upstart to beat Google is to offer everything they do but with the Privacy settings on max.
Re:The real story (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't even have to have an abusive ex-husband. I found I had acquired a follower with the unlikely name of "Kleetman Nissanka." Our buddy Kleetman seems to have assembled a collection of people to follow--all of whom are women, and all of whom have the same first name as mine. He may have found my public profile (which lists two websites, both business-related), but I certainly didn't give him permission to follow me. I have now cleansed Kleetman from my profile and re-disabled Buzz. I guess people at Google don't have to worry about stalkers, spammers, and other assorted gentry.
Re:The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
If she enabled Buzz, I don't see it as necessarily the case that she's misinterpreting it. When I enabled Buzz, instantly I was following 8 people, and 7 of those people were following me back, based on the fact that we'd email a bunch. As I read it, that's what she thinks happened--- that Google had her ex-husband auto-follow her, because they'd exchanged emails. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to approve followers, either. And, your Google Reader comments are by default visible to your followers, something I also didn't realize until one of those 7 followers of mine commented on a post of mine.
Now in my case those 7 auto-followers are people I actually know and don't object to following me, and I had nothing particularly private in my Google Reader comments, but it was still quite surprising and felt a bit weird that it was all done automatically. I would've felt much more comfortable if Google used email history to suggest contacts, but I still had to approve people individually before they could get access to my stuff. It'd also be nice if it asked me explicitly if I wanted my Google Reader comments shared over Buzz.
Re:The problem with Google (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not the problem.
The problem is that some people think that doing these things via media that are expressly public and searchable is somehow "private", and get really riled up whenever someone makes it more convenient for the people who are intentionally posting things via such media to connect it with the people who would be interested (and, conversely, to find the publicly posted things they themselves are interested in.)
Re:The real story (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhhh.. no you didn't. What you did was misconstrue what I was saying..
Twitter, and Buzz, (and I guess Facebook, I don't use it so I don't really know) are RSS feeds for the masses.
They aggregate "updates" together and show you a feed. My feed looks different to your feed, that's the point of it. In order to facilitate conversation the outgoing feed and the incoming feed are aggregated into a single feed. So when I say "hey folks, just signed up to Buzz", it appears in my feed, even though I'm not following myself. That way when someone says "hey, me too!" 15 minutes later I don't have to remember what I said 15 minutes ago.. it looks like upside-down chat.
One of the nifty features of Buzz (and I expect Twitter to copy it soon if it hasn't already) is that you can subscribe to a blog through it.. then whenever someone posts something on their blog you get an update and can go check it out. Unfortunately, this feature was not adequately explained, so when little-miss-freaks-out-alot here decided to tick the "add my reader to my feed" button she assumed she had just broadcast its contents to everyone. That is, she confused the outgoing feed with the incoming feed.
The Google engineers have failed to indicate clearly the origin and destination of updates in the aggregated feed.
Simply put, they shoved in a feature that they thought was neat but didn't consider its UI impact.
Re:NO MORE!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's a little early to draw conclusions on this. People were fairly skeptical about Android when it was new, and now look at it.
I'm not rooting for it overtly, but I'd like to see more integration in our products. Face book's messaging system is so redundant. Perhaps it's time that we have email duplicate social rather than social duplicate email.
Re:The real story (Score:1, Interesting)
Not flambait. This is what Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually believes [theregister.co.uk]
Mod parent up!
opt-out paradigm (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I'm amazed that Google would stumble out of the blocks like this. Isn't this the same company that keeps things in "beta" and "labs" for years and years? Had this "feature" been available for the general public to play with for a month or three before bringing out the "big guns"--opt-out implementation for all gmail users--these shortcomings would have been caught and remedied before they were inflicted on unsuspecting non-power-users.
Second, I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of creating the spark of life in a new social network platform. Ordinary players in the market have to hope that lightning strikes. As Google already has learned with Orkut, if lightning doesn't strike, maybe your product can find a niche somewhere in the long tail. Or it will never come to life at all. With Buzz, Google decided they didn't want to risk a sunny day, and chose instead to play with the high voltage line. Insta-social network by compelling everyone to connect with their personal email addresses. Deservedly, they're now getting burned--Gmail was many people's default "real" personal email site. Compelling a connection between people's real personal email address to a social network (on an opt-out basis) might shake people free of that preference...
Re:The problem with Google (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html [zephoria.org]
Re:The real story (Score:2, Interesting)
There is another aspect to the lack of privacy that is slightly more subtle than people seeing someone's contacts on their own profile page.
Even if you have no public profile and have Buzz "turned off", people you follow / are followed by can still see your following status on others' profiles if you have a follow / followed relationship with that person as well.
Example: Person A has no public profile, and has Buzz "turned off." Person A follows / is followed by Persons B and C because of the [ridiculous] Buzz defaults or choices on behalf of B and C. Despite A's attempts to preserve their privacy, if B looks at C's public profile, B is alerted to the relationship between A and C.
This is not quite as bad as all the info being displayed to the world in one place, but still warrants concern in the same type of examples that are being brought up by so many people. If an (abusive husband / employer / nosy neighbor) suspects their (wife / employee / neighbor) is (seeking help / negotiating a job offer / whatever) from a particular person, it's still possible that Google will leak that sensitive information to the other party.
As far as I can tell, there is no way to set up Buzz so that no one is able to follow you. So even if you stop following everyone and block everyone that's currently following you (at the risk of seeming rude and offending acquaintances), new people could still decide to follow you. Of course, if you have Buzz "turned off," you have no way of knowing that it has even happened. And if you do have Buzz on, it will require constant attention to immediately reject anyone that tries.
There should definitely be a way to opt out of the Buzz system and database completely and permanently. It is not right that one has to reject and block followers individually if they want to opt out of the service. The root of the problem, of course, is that the service should be opt-in from the beginning, with Gmail users out of the system by default and able to fully remove themselves after opting in.
Personally, I'm considering moving my email away from Gmail as a result of this whole incident, and I've read Google's "Gmail > Buzz and Contacts" help forum [google.com] enough to know that I'm far from the only one.
Another SNAFU that they haven't fixed yet (Score:5, Interesting)
However if you then try to do something with Buzz ("Like" a post or leave a comment) a browser-internal dialog will pop up asking "How do you want to appear to others?" It's a pretty small dialog with the only thing you can really select being if you want who you follow to be public or not, so clearly this is part of their solution to the complaints about privacy. However if you select "save profile and continue" you will then find that the "Display my full name" checkbox has been turned back on, without any notification at all! And of course if you uncheck it again, the next time you try to do anything with Buzz you'll have to go through the dialog again. There is an "edit" button on the dialog which opens up more options, but even under there there's no option to leave the "display full name" option unchecked. (Although it was hard to determine that since the dialog that pops up is taller than my browser window, so i had to maximize the window just to be able to see it all.)
Note that you are never told "you must make your full name public in order to use Buzz" and the option itself says nothing about Buzz, just that your profile won't be searchable. It's not clear if that's the behaviour Google wanted (which would be stupid) and they're just not telling us about it (which would also be stupid) or if they just screwed up the dialog and settings in their rush to address the privacy concerns.
Re:The real story (Score:3, Interesting)
Those who have marked this down as flamebait probably missed that this was quoting the opinion on privacy of Eric Schmidt, CEO/Chairman of Google Inc.:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" [youtube.com]
Re:When you can stare down China... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tutorial about privacy before activating Buzz (Score:3, Interesting)
Good advice in that cnet article.
I went to http://www.google.com/profiles [google.com] to look up my profile.
No search box, so I clicked on the first example name. [google.com]
And then I read her last buzz. :P
Buzz things turn up as a message in your inbox?! Disabling now. Heart attack.
Re:People don't read. (Score:3, Interesting)
I never got a page instructing me on anything.
Is it something to do with using Gmail Notifier to log in?
I clicked, my mail popped up, and there was this dang coloured round thing on the left, and when I clicked on it it told me I was following a bunch of people and some other crap. I just finished unfollowing and deleting. I don't need all that spam. I'm not even interested in any of the people it auto-followed...
Re:opt-out paradigm (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
What about POP and IMAP users? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how many people that do not use the web interface, but have gmail accounts, will not even know they are exposed.
Going back to using only my own email servers because who knows what stupid thing they are going to dump on the web next.
DID they fix the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the problems, so far as I can tell from the back-and-forth:
1. Google Buzz is opt-out.
2. Google Buzz treats gmail contacts as "friends".
3. Google Buzz exposes "friends" in your profile. This is also opt-out.
This means that people who have never interacted with Buzz at all *already* have had their privacy exposed. And people who *have* interacted with buzz may not know about the problem.
How do you fix this? Well, you can't "unsee" things on the Internet, so they can't undo any compromises that have happened as a result of this exposure, but they could block everyone's friends lists and make everyone opt in again. Have they done that? I still see Buzz showing up in my list of filters, and the option to display friends is still opt-out. Making it more obvious IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR IT doesn't change the fact that it's on by default.
I read it, understood it.... (Score:3, Interesting)
And it still did something that completely stunned me.
I didn't want buzz. I don't like Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter. I just want a damn e-mail account that just sends e-mail. So when it popped up and asked if I wanted to use Buzz, I clicked No.
Small point here that is important later...I have never created nor set up a Google Profile.
So, a friend whom I e-mail quite regularly buzzed a few things. I was automatically set up to follow him. Why? I said, "I don't want Buzz, take me to my inbox."
Then a few friends of his, who I know of but I have never exchanged e-mails with, replied to his buzz. *This becomes "interesting" in a second. *
So today, I read through Slashdot and find a link explaining how to truly turn off buzz. One step is to look at your profile. I don't have a profile I says to myself. So I go to the Google profile page and log in, not Create a Profile, but log in. Oh look, a skeleton profile, with a big blue Create Profile button at the bottom. I click the "Contacts" tab at the top and there are a bunch of contacts that are not mine. People I have never e-mailed, at all. I look at the names and recognize them as friends of my friend. I may have received some e-mails in the past with them in the Cc field, but I never e-mailed these people. And here they are as part of my contacts all because they replied to my friend's Buzz.
WTF? Why do I then have to explicitly remove them as contacts? I never explicitly added them, Google made that decision without asking me. It was a shitty implementation and a complete failure at security and privacy.